ABSTRACT
Postdevelopment questions the idea that the ‘developed’ societies provide an example for the Other to follow and that the Western models of the economy, politics, and knowledge have to be universalized. However, designating these models as ‘Western’ neglects that they have become hegemonic in Western Europe and North America only through conflictive historical processes – and that until today they are not uncontested. As researchers located in the North, we therefore would like to shift our gaze towards the alternatives to ‘development’ that can be found here. We examine the cases of community-supported agriculture (CSA; ‘Solidarische Landwirtschaft’), a tenement trust (‘Mietshäusersyndikat’), and the anti-coal movement (‘Ende Gelände’), asking to what extent they correspond to the postdevelopment ideas of non-capitalist practices, new commons, local knowledge, and a break with colonialism.
